Funding restored for School of Americas

Christian Century, Oct 13, 1999

Senate and House negotiators have restored funding for the controversial School of the Americas that the House tried to shut down last summer. According to Representative Jack Kingston (R., Ga.), House conferees on the fiscal 2000 foreign operations spending bill agreed September 22 to accept the Senate's position that included $2 million in the State Department budget to pay the expenses of Latin American soldiers who attend the school at Fort Benning, Georgia. The vote won't become final until negotiations on the entire bill conclude, but Kingston, a House conferee, said the section dealing with funding for the army school has been closed and cannot be reopened. "The School of the Americas is in there. It's survived another year."

For a decade, the school has been the target of a campaign by liberal religious activists because some of its graduates were linked to such incidents as the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests and two women in E1 Salvador. Last summer the House voted 230-197 to remove the $2 million in training funds. It was the first time in five votes by the House since 1993 that the lawmakers had gone on record opposing the school.

Roy Bourgeois, the Catholic priest who led the campaign against the school, said the conference committee's action will not diminish the campaign. "We are not going away," he said. "We're going to keep coming back to Washington and to the main gate at Fort Benning in greater and greater numbers every year until that school is shut down."--RNS